In a forum called United Methodist Insight dated January 23,
Mark R. Holland comments on the so-called Wesley Covenant Association’s (WCA) announced
plans to abandon The United Methodist Church essentially no matter what kind of
decision the Special Session of General Conference makes in February. He examines in some depth the public strategy
that the WCA seems determined to follow.
I deeply lament the possibility that The United Methodist
Church (UMC) might divide or even splinter.
For the life of me, I don’t understand how a denomination that has
survived controversies such as slavery, lay representation, women’s ordination,
uniting The Methodist Church and The Evangelical United Brethren, civil rights
and interracial marriage can be looking at dissolution over the issues that the
UMC is addressing in The Way Forward. At this point there are folks far more
insightful than I who are dealing with the questions at hand.
But I can’t help wondering about one form that any Silver
Lining might take. What if, in the event
of a full-blown split in the UMC, that people who are not Wesleyan Methodists
at heart go their own way, leaving historic Methodism, albeit numerically
diminished, intact? The UMC has long attracted
clergy from other denominations because we would accept them after
divorce. The UMC Pension Plan and
Guaranteed Appointment has a certain allure to pastors who are part of
communions that don’t offer similar benefits.
The UMC also has a reputation (sometimes deserved) for being willing to
take anyone into its ranks who merely expresses a desire to do so.
The same can be said for lay members. When some denominations would not let people
enter into full participation in congregational life because of divorce, the
UMC welcomed them with open arms. And it
was right so to do. But where we failed
was in properly instructing or examining these transfers. The church has a
right to ask of potential members that they understand and uphold United
Methodist doctrine.
The UMC is one of those denominations that champions
compromise. One spouse has spent a
lifetime in a particular denomination.
The other is a member of a different group. Neither person is comfortable in the church
of the other, and so they couple chooses the UMC as some kind of middle-of-the-road
alternative. They become titular
Methodists even though there is no core agreement with our theology by either
of them.
There are other choices that have little to do with
embracing Wesleyanism. The choosing of membership in a local UMC might boil
down to nothing more than a family moving to a community where there is no
congregation of their own denomination.
The UMC becomes their alternative because it is “the only game in town.” There are also more than a few people on our
rolls who have entered for programmatic, social or even recreational
reasons. But they had no sense of
choosing The United Methodist Church because it most clearly reflected their
own spiritual journey.
So, what if the coming storm is a way of making Congregationalists
out of Congregationalists, of making biblical literalists out of literalists
and making hard-liners out of hard-liners while leaving the children of John Wesley
to pursue this unique mix of knowledge and vital piety?
I know there are those that would say that I am being
uncharitable. Perhaps I am. I will live with that judgment. But as I began, I observed that it may be
that division is inevitable. And it may
be, may be, that this is that
fragment of good that can come out of a bad situation.
It seems clear that we cannot go on the way we are.
People have always been able to leave a denomination and often do, and congregations have always been able to withdraw from the UMC (though by no means easily, and that's a good thing, I think). What seems new is this overt and concerted effort to split the denomination apart. That's what is uncharitable in my mind.
ReplyDelete